Star Trek Beyond

I finally got the chance to go see Star Trek Beyond and I have to say that I liked it. They really do appeal to the non-Trekkie crowd (which definitely pisses off the Trekkies) and that is fine with me since I never really got into Star Trek that much. I have seen the movies, but did not watch the shows (a few episodes TNG here and there). I don’t know why, I guess when you are a Star Wars fan, it is ingrained in your brain that you must hate Star Trek.

The movie was not perfect, but it was definitely a good movie in this new series. Here are some of my stray observations:

-Kirk at the beginning of the film. You could really feel how much things were weighing on the captain. I thought Chris Pine really knocked those scenes out of the park. He had that purposelessness down and the struggle that someone may face while out in deep space.

-How does a universal translator work? Does it read the beings mind? It just seems really odd to me. In fact, most things about that opening stuff seemed odd. The alien lady comes and they just trust that she is telling the truth about her ship needing help? There is no protocol about meeting unknown aliens? Just send a ship out to see if she is telling the truth.

–Yorktown, the space station, looked incredible. I suppose scientists freaked out about it being inaccurate or something, but who cares? It looked pretty damn cool. A space station with artificial gravity. Being able to look up from one building and see other people in a building looking up at you. Whoa.

-I am guessing that a ships shields do not prevent small ships from ramming into you. Seems like something one of the engineers should work on, since you know, there are tiny meteors and other stuff that fly at high speed and could puncture the hull of a ship…

-Most of the movie, I sat there trying to figure out why Krall hated the Federation. It was finally revealed and it was okay. I mean, it worked, especially with the earlier stuff with Kirk questioning his place and all of that. I guess the reveal just did not blow me away.

-Okay, so I love anytime these movies decide to toss in some Beastie Boys. However, you cannot tell me that an alien race that uses some kind of hive-mind to control their drones (which is what Krall took over to create his ships), would not add in a feature to block out being jammed by a radio signal. Whatever, it was still cool hearing “Sabotage.” Also, I liked how all the crew came up with the method to defeat them.

-Speaking of the crew…this movie did try to incorporate some of the nameless crew into things. Obviously it would be hard for us to get to know everyone, but it would still be cool to see a throwaway scene where Kirk walks the hallways (and instead of seeing people hooking up or breaking up), they all say something “Captain” and he responds with their name. Showing that he knows everyone on that ship.

-I thought the supporting characters had an even bigger role in this movie. Bones was fantastic (seriously, I wish Karl Urban would become a bigger star). Although, if I had one problem, it was when Bones asks Spock about Vulcan physiology. Bones is the ship’s doctor. I realize there are plenty of alien species, but you would think that the ship’s doctor would brush up on the anatomy of all the crew members. What if Spock were unconscious? Would he have had to guess where his heart was located?

I hope the Enterprise can survive the next movie. Maybe they should consider just renaming the ship…

Ugh. Do we really need to get into this? Google translate does not translate a new language. For example, if a time traveling Cretan came to the Google office and started speaking Eteocretan, the software would not be able to translate it. If I understand Google Translate correctly, it is just taking the lexicons of every language and trying to choose the best word possible, (I am guessing it is more complex than that).

However, in Star Trek, the universal translator takes an unknown language, from an unknown species and automatically translates it. I just do not see how that would be possible (without some sort of mind-reading). I mean, think about what they are saying first of all about the simplicity of all alien species.

Maybe the movie should have had the universal translator recognize the language as some dialect of Noorbop from the Q’allian Sector, that would have made more sense.

I realize that the universal translator in Star Trek is just a simple plot device so that we do not have to spend time contemplating how difficult it would be to communicate each time you met up with a new group of people. Maybe the universal translator is built in such a way that if they are more advanced, then it deciphers their language very quickly via math (I feel like math would be the quickest primer, which is what I learned from the book Contact by Carl Sagan).